Grand Canyon Diary- Part 3
At some point early in your preparation for going to the Grand Canyon, you find yourself on YouTube.com. Turns out that everything that has happened for years is either on YouTube or is about to be. It’s insane. My father uses it to watch videos from heaven-knows-where of his favorite music. As his favorite music was written, performed, and saw its creators die long before there were music videos, much less computers, you have to wonder where the hell they’re getting these videos. I imagine that some were performances on obscure old TV shows being hosted by a Red Skeleton or somesuch. I admit to being baffled. At any rate, his own work now appears on YouTube. So the circle is now complete, we’ve all joined the Dark Side, and YouTube owns us and our kitty-cats that chase laser pointers.
So. Everything else being covered, YouTube, of course, has lots of video of whitewater rafts flipping over in a ‘hole’. A hole, as you probably know, is a spot in a river where you have:
1. A rock,
2. A steep decline in your feet above sea level, and
3. Water that momentarily and repeatedly smashes itself back upstream against the aforementioned rock.
If this sounds like the dumbest place in the world to put a boat filled with your food, dry clothes and the things that prevent you from being stung by scorpions in your sleep, then you’ll get no argument from me.
You know, it’s one thing to read about rafts flipping in holes. It’s another thing entirely to see video of someone’s boat flipping over in a hole. When you see it, you’re not seeing ‘it’. You’re seeing YOU. In your mind’s wide eye, it will not be that little video person, but yourself. You will, you know, be IN that boat when it does its drunken lurch to the upstream side. You will no longer be in that boat when the little video person is chucked out of that upended mess into the chocolate-milk-colored river. And as you watch the tiny little video person claw its way through the water, you remember the part about only having a few minutes to get out of the river before your body heat departs, leaving no forwarding address.
It’s best to take YouTube.com in small bites.
Discussion ¬